“I’m promiscuously autobiographical.” – Samuel R. Delany1 “Improvisation, in whatever possible excess of representation that inheres in whatever probable deviance of form, always also operates as a kind of foreshadowing,…
Contemporaries Essays
Improbable Communities: Post-precarity and the Politics of Sex in Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand appeared in 1984, the same year as William Gibson’s Neuromancer. While more people have likely read Gibson’s novel, Delany gives…
Delany’s Complex Singularity or, the Astonishing Whole
Twenty-five years ago, Lauren Berlant’s and Michael Warner’s essay “Sex in Public” traced how the privatization of sex devastated public sex cultures in New York City at the turn of…
Phallos/Phallus: Queer Sex Magick
Author’s note #1: On the cover of Samuel R. Delany’s metafictional novella Phallos is a drawing of a winged Minotaur: head and tail of a bull, beclawed hands and foot,…
“Filthy!”: an Introduction to Samuel Delany’s Late Paraliterary Style
In his 2005 essay “The Gamble,” Samuel R. Delany recounts a dinner conversation he had with a gay porn star named B.J., who told Delany that he contracted HIV from…
Blueprints for a Red Sexual Revolution: Samuel Delany’s Sexual Commons
For Earl Jackson Jr. who introduced me to Samuel R. Delany’s brilliance. Willfully Confusing Sex and Revolution Early in my professional career, when I had just moved back from California…
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre at 50
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (TCM) has been widely recognized as a groundbreaking and politicized contribution to the horror canon and to the slasher subgenre in particular. This month, on its…
// Texas / Chain Saw / Atmospheres //
In the paragraphs that follow, preferably in John Larroquette’s voice, please read / pronounce / hear the word “slash” whenever you see / read the punctuation that follows this colon:…
Chainsaw Meridian
The familiar sound of a spade slicing through terrain. A series of off-centre, inconsistently focused holiday snapshots; glimpses of the night before. Shadows stretch westward, the sky glows amber, its…
The Grim Meat-Hook Realities of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
“We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that Sixties. Uppers are going out of style. This was the fatal flaw in…